bendedreality.com
| City on Mars: How We Could Build It
If we want to someday live on Mars, spaceships won't be enough. We would need a Martian city—and this is how we might build one. In many ways, the problem of moving to Mars is simply a packing problem. We need a lot of gear (food, water, shelter) to keep us alive, and the only way to ensure that we have that gear, at least at first, is to bring it along with us, like turtles carting our homes on our back. If you're talking about life on Mars and not just a vacation or a research trip, we'll need more than just the most basic means of supporting life. We'll need large infrastructure, including sturdy housing that lasts. We'll need agricultural structures and storage. We'll need roads for transport. And the means to get a lot of that is by mixing concrete, which is why researchers at Northwestern University's Civil Engineering department have been working on an usual project: how we might transform Martian dirt into Martian concrete. In a working paper posted on ArXiv, lead researcher